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☀️Clear skies, with highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 6:53 p.m.
The Division of Marine Fisheries is monitoring some low-oxygen zones in Cape Cod Bay. What does that mean?
“It’s a seasonal phenomenon,” Malcolm Scully, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told CAI’s Gilda Geist. In the warmer months, the more oxygen-rich water closer to the ocean’s surface gets warm and bottom waters stay cooler, with little mixing between the two. That means less dissolved oxygen gets to deeper waters. Plus, organic material sinks down and bacteria eats it — consuming dissolved oxygen in the process.
“By this time of year, we often see some of the lowest oxygen values of the season,” Scully said. “It’ll stick around until we get a really strong wind mixing event, as the storms from the fall and the winter begin to roll through.”
If oxygen levels drop too low, as happened in 2019 and 2020, some marine organisms can die off. But that’s not happening right now, Scully said: the advisory shows oxygen levels of 4 milligrams per liter. “We really start to worry about it when it gets to be 2 milligrams/liter or lower,” he said. “It hasn’t gotten to the point where it’s causing any significant negative influences on the organisms that live in those bottom waters.” You can listen to the full conversation here.
Four Things to Know
1. The city of Everett cancelled its Fiesta Del Rio — a Hispanic Heritage month celebration in a public park that usually draws a few hundred people — over fears that federal immigration agents will target the event. It was originally planned for Saturday, Sept. 20.
At-large city councilor Katy Rogers said the city council was not involved in the decision to cancel the event, but that her office has gotten more messages about ICE sightings and detainments in the last two weeks. “There’s a lot of fear being instilled in our community because people don’t know when ICE is going to show up. And because the elected officials do not have any official communication or information about ICE activity, it increases this fear,” she said.
2. One in three Massachusetts residents who responded to a new CommonWealth Beacon poll said they either delayed getting medical care or skipped it altogether because of costs in the last year. Still, 76% of respondents said they are either very satisfied (40%) or somewhat satisfied (36%) with their health insurance.
And: the higher a person’s income and education level, the more likely they were to say Massachusetts was one of the top states in the nation for health care quality. About 27% of respondents with a high school diploma, and one third third of those earning less than $50,000 a year, said they’d rank Massachusetts near the top for health care quality — compared with half of those earning over $100,000 and 58% of people with advanced degrees. You can see the survey’s topline and download crosstabs here.
3. A proposal to expand the list of contaminants tracked by the state’s air quality monitoring network is currently making its way through legislative committees. The contaminants that would be measured include black carbon, nitrogen oxides and ultrafine particulate matter, according to the State House News Service.
“Unlike fine particulate matter, which spreads out over large geographical areas, what we’re really focused on here is ultrafine particulate matter, which is more health-damaging and stays in the immediate vicinity of polluting sources,” said Paulina Muratore, director of transportation justice and infrastructure at the Conservation Law Foundation.
4. King’s Chapel on Tremont Street, a stop on Boston’s Freedom Trail, yesterday unveiled a 14-foot-tall statue of a Black woman releasing 219 birds from a cage — a monument to the 219 people enslaved by the church’s former members and ministers.
“When people think about slavery here in Boston, they think that ‘up here’ wasn’t as rough. But they don’t realize that there were actually slave owners who had plantations in the Caribbean,” said Roeshana Moore-Evans, strategic advisor for the King’s Chapel committee responsible for the memorial.
How do you build a professional team from scratch? Boston Legacy FC is finding out.
Here’s the pitch: if you’re an elite soccer player joining Boston’s new National Women’s Soccer League, Boston Legacy FC, you’ll get to play your first season at Gillette Stadium and subsequent home games at a newly-reconstructed White Stadium. The team has a sparkling new practice facility in Brockton and a bit of cash to throw around: $1.065 million in allocation money above the league’s usual salary cap, plus transfer funds to try and get players from other NWSL teams.
But there’s also a bigger chance to build something, said Sam Mewis, a three-time title winner with the National Women’s Soccer League. She is also a member of the 2019 World Cup-winning U.S. Women’s National Team, and a Hanson, Mass. native. Mewis is now part of the Legacy’s athlete advisory board.
“Boston is in such a cool position, where they get to come in at this time when the standard is so high,” Mewis said. “Players who come here in this first year will get to help shape the culture of this club and get to help the community and the fans learn what it’s all about and build that up.”
GBH’s Esteban Bustillos got an inside look at how the team is being built as its 2026 opening season draws closer. The league no longer has a draft — the process in which potential players all go into one big pool of talent and are chosen by teams with little say over where they’ll go. Instead, team officials are in talks with the players they want.
“We’ve got depth charts. We’ve got long lists. We’ve got options that we’re speaking to. But as we start to add more pieces to the jigsaw, the picture starts to become that little bit clearer,” said Edward Gallagher, the team’s director of recruitment. He carries two cell phones to keep track of it all. “We’re constantly working, constantly moving, constantly evaluating, but we do have an idea in our head about who we want to target.”
You can read Esteban’s full story here.
Dig deeper:
-Boston Legacy FC coach Filipa Patão looks forward to facing challenges of leading new NWSL team
-How White Stadium’s renovation is impacting the 2025 mayoral race
-As girls’ flag football gains ground, this Massachusetts tournament showcases its stars
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